


i am tired, i am yours.

by withkissesfour



Series: let our walls cave in [4]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: 5 Times, Introspection, M/M, Prompt Fic, Smut, plus one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 07:45:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20597207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withkissesfour/pseuds/withkissesfour
Summary: He likes the idea of oversleeping with somebody like him, a body like him, and running late for work together, coffee together, waking up rough on the train together. He wonders at it, happily, loosely, their fully fledged love story snatched out of thin air and left to float through his head, a life without roots.Five beds that aren't Patrick's (and one that's mostly David's).





	1. i. the man on the train

**Author's Note:**

> 2\. sleeping in 
> 
> A series of Soft™ prompts, asked on tumblr, because this show makes me Very Soft™ (https://aboldclaim.tumblr.com/post/184870558900/a-soft-fic-prompt-meme)
> 
> (Also this was originally gonna be one chapter, and then it SPIRALLED into a very long love letter to Patrick Brewer, so I've split it six chapters lol)

Patrick is in love with a man on the train, with sleep in his eyes and a newspaper tucked beneath his arm. 

He doesn’t know his name. He’s never seen him before, technically. He’s never noticed him on the bleary-eyed commute into the city until this morning, and he falls in love with him the way people fall in love with strangers all the time - fully, forgetfully, the feeling discarded when they reach their stop and dig through for their wallets. 

The man has a sharp suit and a soft beard. He has an old briefcase between his feet, and Patrick imagines a sprawling office in the city somewhere, a cabinet full of scotch. He looks like a scotch drinker. He looks like a baseball fan. He looks like a lawyer, like an accountant, like a stock broker. He probably likes coffee. He probably likes dogs. He probably reads the business section first. Thick-rimmed glasses frame his eyes, which he presses closed as he sways with the movement on the train so Patrick feels less shy about looking. He likes the way he looks. He likes the way he feels when he looks at him. 

The ends of his nerves feel set alight, like someone has struck a match against each one, and the warmth fills his body, escapes onto his cheeks. He feels anxious in an adolescent sort of way, and courageous, and  _ good _ . He feels too distracted to order his emotions into some equation with an answer, and he’d need more coffee for that anyway, so he leans into the feeling instead, lets himself build up a romance in his head.

He imagines some other life where he’s not leaving this city at the end of the week, where he’s not newly single and freshly guilt-ridden, where things are different. It’s a thoughtless edifice he’ll build up and tear down in forty minutes, and move on with his day, but there’s something freeing about it, romance without history, love without reality. The real kind is messy, in his experience, the real kind can hurt. 

He thinks that’s what he’d tell Rachel, if she asked, if they were still talking. He wants to tell her it hurts. He wants to tell her about the man on the train, wants to tell her about everything, all the time, but the loose ends of wedding plans hang between them, guilt him into a five day silence. 

It’s the longest they’ve gone without speaking.

Hurt had filled up their recent Sunday, had filled up their apartment as they’d unfurled their history inside it, picked through it for something to salvage. There’s years of him and her. There’s  _ decades  _ to their relationship, and it felt cruel to discard them like they meant nothing, felt callous to tell her what he wanted to tell her, untarnished. He wanted to tell her he loves her. He wanted to tell her he doesn’t want her. He wanted to say he doesn’t know what he wants, but that it isn’t this city, this apartment, this bed, this commute, this wedding, a  _ wife _ , and he needs to get out, and they need to not speak for a while. He wants to know what he wants. 

Instead they’d batted half-truths between each other until they were tired, until they were tired of talking. They’re used to obfuscating out of their relationship to protect each other’s feelings, but it felt less familiar, this time, less bearable. 

There was a newfound discomfort with each other, an exhaustion of their good humour towards the infinite loop their relationship seems to be on - in and out, back and forth, drunken hookups and accidental texts over and over again and it  _ always _ falls apart, and it  _ always  _ hurts. By the end of it he’d felt like a mess, and she’d looked ten times smaller, petite frame curled in on itself and bright hair fidgeted between her fingers as she’d sat on the opposite corner of their bed which doesn’t feel like theirs anymore, which she’d been in hours earlier when they woke late and read the weekend papers. He thinks she was too sad to be angry, and he’d been too guilty to be sad, and so they said they’d see how things went, and that was that. By Sunday it was all over, and by Wednesday he’d found a job, found a place, found a town with a stupid name. He slept in his old bedroom at his parent’s house, and she helped him pack up his things from their place, and he kept their old yearbooks and she kept the ring. 

It’s Friday, and the man on the train stifles a yawn in the sleeve of his suit, a well-timed distraction from an uncharacteristic spiral. 

Patrick wonders if  _ he _ has a wife. He wonders if he has a husband, a partner, or a string of lovers, a bed in every port - thousand thread count sheets and a person tangled in each one. He likes the idea of going to bed in a bed that isn’t his own, or hers, or theirs. He wonders what it would be like to go to bed with someone like  _ him.  _

He’s still himself in this fantasy, a him he understands, and he knows the right thing to say when he gathers up the courage to talk to the man on the train. It would turn out that he's been looking at Patrick, too. It would turn out they’re reading the same book, or they like the same sort of food, or they work at the same building, or they live in the same apartment block. He would get off at the same stop as Patrick, and he would ask him to dinner, and things would make sense -  _ he  _ would make sense - when he kisses him outside his door, asks if they can do it again soon. They would do it again, soon. And again, and again, and then he’d invite Patrick in for a drink, and they would drink, they would talk, they would fuck, his head against soft pillows, his body arched against his body, and his hands, and his mouth, and his beard, and his  _ body. _

He likes the idea of oversleeping with somebody like him, a body like him, and running late for work together, coffee together, waking up rough on the train together. He wonders at it, happily, loosely, their fully fledged love story snatched out of thin air and left to float through his head, a life without roots.

He wonders, and wonders, as the train jolts to a stop, and he wants, and wants, and  _ wants  _ him as he brushes past to reach the doors, as he’s shuffled out by a pile of sleepy commuters, and then he forgets. 

*

Patrick is in love with the man across his desk, with skeptical eyebrows and a business plan.

He’s never met him before. He’s seen him, he thinks, at the cafe with his family, wedged in a corner and draped in sweaters. Patrick’s seen him a few times in the fortnight or so he’s been here, has noticed him. He’s the type of man you notice. He’s the type of man that has perfected the art of being noticed, but only out of necessity, only under sufferance - a manufactured air of begrudging politeness that cloaks something genuine, something  _ warm.  _

Patrick has noticed him, notices him now, and falls in love with him the way you fall in love with a stranger you know a little bit about - wholly, hopefully - like you could know more, like they could let you know more, like if you knew their name it’s two steps away from knowing how they like their coffee, how they look in the morning. 

He doesn’t know how David looks in the morning. 

He knows his name is David. He knows he leased the general store, is pretty sure he owns the town. He knows, now, that he doesn’t like sports metaphors, knows he fidgets with the rings guarding his fingers when he’s nervous. Patrick knows David’s attractive, a sharp jaw and perfect hair and quick wit, and the warmth that rises in Patrick chest doesn’t stop, bubbles over into a smile, caught behind his fingers as David talks. He knows David seems stressed, seems to have a good idea that he can’t quite articulate, seems to talk with his hands, violently, dramatically, a lot. He wants to listen to David talk, wants to hear everything he has to say, and wants and wants and  _ wants  _ him, wants to know what he looks like in the morning and it doesn’t go away, the wanting and wanting, and wanting, and he doesn’t forget it, when David stands to leave, so he gives him his business card.


	2. the boy in the car.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wants to bury himself in the quilt cover and wake up at a normal hour, process things in fractions, like a sane, well-rested human, but his body won’t let him, because David had kissed him.

He’d kept his seatbelt on. 

He’d asked him out. He’d put on a suit jacket, framed a receipt, paid for dinner. He’d driven him home. He’d felt like a teenager in the car outside the motel, body full of want and mozzarella sticks. He’d had a plan, had a speech, had his courage screwed to the sticking post until he’d caught David catching him staring at his mouth, and his nerves began to fry and his bravery dwindled in the distance between their seats. All his plans to be smooth_ , _to make something happen between them, disappeared, and all he could think about was how he’d let the right moment pass, and how stupid he must look, and how much he’d wanted to lean over, and kiss him. He’d kept his seatbelt on. 

It’s all Patrick can think about, wide awake, five am, the street light still peeking through gaps in the curtain. It throws shadows onto the chintz wallpaper behind the bed, changing the collection of flowers there so they twist and grow towards the ceiling, creep towards the floor. He never paid them much mind, never really thought about how long he would be surrounded by them, in this town, in this room, behind this bed. He thinks David would call them _ tacky _ if he was here, but they bloom in all their faded gaudiness now, turn into something different right in front of his bleary eyes. 

The whole room seems different. Everything feels like it’s shifted, like the furniture has been rearranged while he slept, like someone has pushed at the wall to give his heart more room. The old metal bed, which squeals when he shifts, feels more stable beneath his body, and the sheets feel different against his skin, and he wants to go back to sleep. He wants to bury himself in the quilt cover and wake up at a normal hour, process things in fractions, like a sane, well-rested human, but his body won’t let him, because David had _ kissed _him. 

He’s had a handful of first kisses. He’s felt the sway of expectation at the end of dinner dates, ran headlong through the newness of them in a blind confusion he became accustomed to, in cars and college dorm rooms.

His _ first _ first kiss was in the backyard pool of Rachel’s parents’ place, in the dead of summer and the middle of his teenage years, and it was awkward and untidy and sweet. It hadn’t been monumental or anything, had felt more messy and less dizzying than he’d been led to believe of kissing, but Rachel had looked pretty with wet strands of her hair sticking to her cheeks, and he’d had all the blustering, empty confidence of a fifteen year-old. Rachel was his friend, and was funny, and steady, and kind, and had her bright eyes trained on his face that summer afternoon before she swam closer and kissed him, and it was nice to be looked at like that. It always felt nice to have someone want to kiss him, but he’s never felt like he felt last night. He’s never felt _ so much. _

It felt like too much to handle, like he might overflow, fall apart if he tried to deal with it all at once but he hadn’t wanted it to stop, hadn’t wanted to grasp for the memory of being kissed by David for the first time years from now. He’d wanted to catalogue it, the car door underneath his white-knuckled grip, the handbrake against his hip, his present trapped between David’s feet.

The hem of the sleeve of David’s dark sweater had been soft against his collarbone, and the cool metal of David’s rings had been smooth against his jaw, and David’s stubble felt strange, nice, against his own. David had tasted like the remnants of cafe birthday cake, and Patrick had wanted to set up house in that moment, make a life for himself in it. He’d wanted to let it wash over him, and he’d wanted to commit it to memory, learn every sensation by rote until he could recite them (sweater, rings, stubble, lips, birthday cake). He’d wanted to kiss him again. 

It was only by sheer force of will he’d managed to convince himself out of the carpark, navigating the short distance to Ray’s and quietly up the stairs, and through pajamas and under the covers. He’d had to hide his phone so he wouldn’t send some _ daft _ message, had to force himself to sleep so he wouldn’t overthink things, wouldn’t ruin things. He had thought he should send something, _ happy birthday _ or _ see you tomorrow _ or _ can we do that again? _ but everything he’d typed seemed idiotic, out of place amongst the early days of him and him. They’re there, in a steady back and forth of coffee orders and shop talk, fledgling markers of friendship and attempts at flirting. It’s all laid out in print and bookended with voicemails, but last night is _ his. _David had leaned in. David had made it happen, with his kind eyes and his rough stubble and his soft mouth, and they’d kept their seatbelts on, and he can’t think about anything else.

He can’t be expected to think about anything else. He can’t be expected to _ sleep. _

Patrick untangles himself from his bedsheets instead, tangles himself in the uncharacteristic shame pile of clothes in the corner of the room. He’s always been told he has a sort of steady, boring, organised way about him. He’s always felt determined to be decisive, and eager to be easy-going, but he doesn’t feel it now - clouded by what he should wear, and what to do in the hours before the store opens, before he sees David, and if he should do something with his hair. 

It’s the sort of thing he’s climbed a mountain about, the last few weeks, traipsed up and down the same walk like the pain in his legs and the poison oak and the view of the valley with the long stretch of horizon at sunrise could give him the answers, could tell him if his business partner liked him back. It had been a good distraction, would be a good distraction now, but he finds himself fixating instead on _ which _ blue button down says _ thanks for kissing me last night, I’m feeling super cool about it, can we do it again? _He finds himself at their store. 

He finds a mountain of boxes, a fresh delivery waiting outside on the steps to keep him preoccupied from the cloud of angst and adrenaline fogging his body. It feels like being yanked through adolescence by his belt loops and told to start over. It’s like he’s doing it all again - all the text messages, and pining, and long nights in bed alone, and first dates and driving, and sitting in the car with the boy he wants to kiss. It makes him think about the boys he might have wanted to kiss, and the boys that might have wanted to kiss him. It makes him think about Rachel.

It makes him think about David, and what it would be like to kiss him again, what it would be like to go to bed with him, and what his body might feel like against his body, inside his body.

He wonders what David would be like to wake up to.

He feels a little overwhelmed, a little panicked by thirty years of feeling bursting open inside of him. He attempts to keep it together, heaves stock into the backroom and rips shakily at boxes, until he feels like he’s going to overflow, like everything he’s feeling is going to spill over onto the hardwood floors, push cardigans from counters, knock succulents from their delicate pots by the window, and David would have to deal with his unmitigated mess. 

He upends a nearby milk crate, and sits on it, lets his head fall into his hands. He feels dizzy. He feels light, and full, and wired. He feels like his heart is sliding into place behind his ribcage, like his body has been shifted upright on the spot, in their store, on their plot of ground, like he was standing askew on the earth and now he’s not. He feels right, feels everything_, _and he can’t stop the room from spinning. He supposes it’s painful to be this happy.

It’s what he wants to tell David, when he sees him. 

He’s earlier than usual, and shy, and here, and Patrick wants to play it cool. He wants to tell him. He wants to tease him. He wants to kiss him. He wants to thank him. He wants to tell him that the flowers on the wall in his bedroom at Ray’s house might be roses, and he wants to show them to him, and he wants to know what he’d be like to wake up to. He wants to tell him, but then David is saying hi, and his hand is on his shoulder, and his cheek is pressed against his cheek, and his warm sweatered chest is against his chest, and he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to think about anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the lovely comments! I love ONE (1) PATRICK BREWER.


	3. new year's eve, new year's day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He nips at the incline of Patrick’s hip before peppering it with kisses, sparking witticisms against his skin like flint against steel.
> 
> “Remind me to date someone more interesting in the new year.”
> 
> -
> 
> Set after 4.13 - "Merry Christmas, Johnny Rose"

_ new year's eve. _

When David stifles a yawn against his hipbone, Patrick decides to call it a year. 

It’s some time before midnight, somewhere in Elmdale, and conversation has run away with the champagne. He’s trying his best to focus, wants to gather every sentence in his head and knot it around their night, neatly packaged New Years’ sentimentality that David would tease him mercilessly about if he wasn’t in it with him - happy and half-awake and talking nonsense, his body bracketed by Patrick’s legs, his chin propped on Patrick’s stomach. 

There’s no thread to the loose, warm chatter that comes after coming, that David muffles against his skin, substituting punctuation with a lazy ellipses of kisses. Sex and alcohol and their thirties have made them tired, and every now and then he’ll feel delirium crawl up his throat, or bubble on David’s lips. Every now and then the bright colours of the muted television bounce across David’s hair, play with the dark strands, which still sit high and a little curly and _ perfect _ atop his head. Patrick wants to reach forward, be the gravitational chaos to his almighty fringe, wants to smooth him over, wants to mess him up. He wants to tell him he looks beautiful, see his mouth twist to catch the compliment. He wants to go to sleep. 

The hotel bed is a sort of thousand thread count chrysalis, foreign sheets tangling around his limbs and sticking to the sweat on his back, his thighs, his neck. It feels odd to watch snow beat against the window, the air inside still and thick, blanketed in the smell of pizza. They’d sprung for room service, dipped into espresso machine savings for top shelf champagne and a mid-level suite. They’d piled the king size bed high with the entire contents of the mini bar, watched half a made-for-television movie before their hands found each other’s bodies under blankets and sweaters and chocolate bar wrappers. 

They’ve done this before in hotel suites, and motel rooms, in David’s bed, in his. They’ve snatched minutes in the car, behind the curtain at the store, in the back of a movie theatre, the bathroom of a restaurant, against the front door of Ray’s house. He’s gone to bed with David, and woken up with him too, held his hand, made him come; but it’s never felt like this. It’s never felt like champagne and pizza and David’s hands at his belt, and the headboard, and the sheets, and scrambling for purchase at his shoulder blades as he arched against him. It’s nothing like just before midnight, just before the end of the year, in a bed that isn’t his, David between his thighs. The moment pins him to the bed, white knuckled grip on the sheets, winding his way through sentences he won’t remember in the morning. 

But he’ll remember watching David’s hair startle out of place as he bends his head to smother a yawn in the hollow of Patrick’s hip. He’ll remember how it felt, messy and surprising and sweet, his hands tightening at Patrick’s waist, cool rings against warm skin, intimacy piled on top of intimacy. 

“Oh,” David says, peers around the room, then up at Patrick, like somehow the noise had escaped from somewhere else, like it hadn’t been stuttered against Patrick’s skin, like maybe Patrick _ won’t _tease him about it. 

He looks ten years younger, dark curls absconding from his fringe to bounce against his forehead, and Patrick feels a flash of envy towards a version of them that never existed, a younger version - stumbling through their early twenties and blistering through midnights with energy and invincibility and unfounded confidence, together. He wishes he knew him, then, and he’s glad they know each other now, settled by a decade and barely able to stay awake. 

Patrick manages to keep it together until David’s eyes are welling with the effort to suppress another yawn, and he bends his head to muffle it against Patrick’s stomach, shaking with laughter.

"Am I boring you down there?" 

“Deeply,” he feels David say, mouth stretched wide with tiredness now scooping low in a grin, mischievous and fond. He nips at the incline of Patrick’s hip before peppering it with kisses, sparking witticisms against his skin like flint against steel. “Remind me to date someone more interesting in the new year.”

“But will they have my good looks?”

“Oh, without a doubt.”

“Well, we had a good run.”

“No arguments here?” 

“I’m quite tired,” he shrugs, reaching for nonchalance and wobbling around euphoria. The free fall is inevitable when happiness is piled this high, when he tries to balance atop a precarious tetris of the last few weeks - mistletoe at the store and carols at the motel and champagne before midnight, and feeling glad he didn’t go home for the holidays, and feeling guilty for being glad. It’s _ painful _, a painful, unstoppable sort of joy, and not for the first time he feels himself crash into the immovable weight of three decades without it. It’s the paradox that causes him to fumble, too happy to feel sad; too sad about not being happy before, and he doesn’t know how to steady himself, doesn’t know how to explain. 

“We can sleep in tomorrow,” he says instead, foregoing teasing for tenderness, reaching forward to tidy David’s hair back so it doesn’t tickle at his stomach. “I got us late check out.”

“Oh,” he halts his progress when David peers up at him through his eyelashes, above a smile that has grown shy, a familiar imitation of a deer caught in the headlights of Patrick’s sincerity.

“What?”

“No, nothing,” David pillows his head against Patrick’s stomach for a moment before he rethinks, lifts himself up, starts to shuffle off the edge of the bed. Patrick feels weight lift from the mattress, feels a weight settle on his chest, and it’s a struggle to sit up and watch him move across the room, it’s a struggle to speak. 

“You okay?”

“Of course,” David says, a little strangled, a little awkward, gesturing wildly across the suite. “Bathroom.”

His shoulders stay pulled towards his ears, like someone has knotted strings to him and is yanking them tight. Patrick wants to cut him loose and ask him back to bed, ask him what he said wrong, what happened between sentences that spooked him halfway across the room. 

He’s paused in front of the television, is briefly sillouhetted by foreign cities ready to light themselves up for the new year, and it throws shadows across his frame, knocks the remaining breath from Patrick’s lungs. David is usually a collection of sweaters and snark, a carefully constructed barrier of couture designed to soften the blows life seems to have dealt him. But he’s here now, over there now, all broad shoulders and wild hair and naked skin. He can make out the taut muscles of his thigh, and the folds in his stomach as he bends to switch off the screen. If he squinted he could see the scar he knows is at the twist of David’s torso, from an as yet unexplained trip over the side of a yacht, or the lines at the corners of his eyes that laughter and anxiety have carved, that will crawl towards his hairline with age. 

Patrick feels like he’s being let in on some great secret, feels the weight of effort it must take for David to lay himself bare when he’s only ever been told he shouldn’t. If half the stories are true, he thinks every time he’s been lulled into cracking his armour open for someone, they’ve not hesitated to plunge the knife in. But he lets Patrick see. He lets Patrick see and see and _ see _him, even now, even after intimacy piled on top of intimacy and knocked him from the bed, and Patrick wants to tell him how lucky he feels, wants to tell him he feels lucky right down to his toes. 

*

_new year's day_

He can’t feel his arm. 

He didn’t make it to midnight, didn’t hear David come back to bed, but he’s asleep around him now. He can’t feel his arm, trapped underneath David’s sleep heavy head, but he can feel everything else - bare skin, fine stubble, David’s slow breath on his shoulder, David’s hand tangled in the sheets at his hip. His legs are tangled in the sheets, too, and he wants to unknot himself from them so he can knot himself around David. He wants to go back to sleep. He wants to get out of this bed.

He makes a vain attempt to wrestle free, but stills as David starts, grumbles, untangles himself and lifts his head from Patrick’s shoulder to scratch at his chin. Sweat has made mischief with his hair and sleep has carved creases in his cheek and he looks like he looks every morning - unravelled, hazy around all of his edges. 

Like every morning, Patrick tries to inventory the endless catalogue of expressions he can manage all at once and barely conscious, head bouncing against the pillow as Patrick rescues his arm. The clock on his bedside table lights David up with the harsh, red, digital glare of four-fifteen in the morning and he's blinking himself awake, watching Patrick shake life back into his hand through bleary eyes, nose wrinkling and mouth working towards a grimace, like he can’t quite bring himself to be annoyed. 

“My arm was asleep,” Patrick offers.

“Could the rest of you follow suit?”

There’s a long silence, and he thinks David must have drifted off. Patrick’s trying to do the same, trying to match David’s low, soft breathing, when he feels him grip his bicep. The nerves still sting, pricked with pins and needles, but David holds him tight, pulls himself closer, so he’s flush against Patrick’s side, so he can muffle sleep-slurred words at the curve of Patrick’s shoulder.

“Huh?”

“I didn’t leave,” he repeats, craning his neck when Patrick turns towards him, voice pitched low like he’s teasing, but fried with exhaustion, shot through with sincerity.

“You didn’t leave.”

Patrick knows where this is going. They’re well practiced in the tightrope lines of their back-and-forth, but he tries to balance with him for a moment, wobble around seriousness for as long as they can. He thinks David feels it too, humming as Patrick leans down to kiss him, sleep heavy eyes and an earnest brow when he pulls away. He wants to tell him he loves him for the first time again, here, now, start over and say it again, new in his mouth and big in his chest every time. He wants to kiss him. He wants to marry him. He wants to tease him, so he does.

“No better offers?” 

“I’m quite tired.”

“I’ll do, then?” 

David’s mouth twists to one side, like he’s trying to screw a lid over a smile that’s fit to burst, but he just grows brighter when Patrick rolls his eyes, tugs him closer. By the time their bedwarm bodies are against each other a grin has blossomed so steadfastly across David’s face that kissing is all tongues and teeth and tiredness, a ridiculous attempt at making out. He feels a little light-headed when David pulls away to catch his breath, steadying himself with a hand on Patrick’s chest, huffing out the remnants of laughter. His fingers map through the light patch of hair below his collarbone, and his gaze follows the blush that has bloomed upwards and across Patrick’s face, from ear to ear, until their eyes catch. 

He looks tired. David looks tired, and bright, certain and _ terrified _, a mess of contradictions that Patrick has no time to unravel before he can feel them pressed against his skin. David’s hiding himself in the crook of Patrick’s neck, burying words there, loosening his lips into a smile there, and Patrick doesn’t mind when he doesn’t move. It’s a safe place for secrets.

"You’ll do.”


End file.
